The Routledge Dictionary of Politics, Third Edition
Regulations are very detailed rules created by authoritative bodies and applicable to specific areas of life. Very often ‘regulation’ will apply to rules inside organizations and public bodies. It is relatively rare to talk about a parliament passing a regulation, as opposed to a law, though a parliament may well pass a law which bestows on some other agency the right to make detailed regulations in some specific area. Thus a corporation may have regulations governing employment practices and a college may have fire safety regulations, but the college is also likely to have some higher and broader level of rules, called something like statutes or by-laws.
In contemporary usage a vital example of regulation is in European Union legislation, where the European Commission has the right to pass regulations.
These, unlike their more normal legislation, called directives, have the quality of direct applicability. This means that a Deregulation has immediately the full force of law in each member country, and can be called upon by citizens in legal cases. A regulation might, for example, cover the labelling of food products or the safety standards for electrical appliances. In such cases individual countries are being treated as essentially non-existent, because the need for standardization is seen as supra-national. More usually a directive will be issued, instructing member governments to pass their own laws for achieving some common end.
This is the complete article, containing 229 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
View More Summaries on Regulation
